When someone is using a vehicle that belongs to another party, or when a driver who is monitored by another party is using a vehicle, it may be desirable to know whether or not that vehicle has traveled into any prohibited areas. Employers may wish to know if employees make stops at bars or take vehicles carrying valuable cargo into unsafe areas. Parents may wish to know if teenage drivers are complying with rules about where the driver is allowed to go. Likewise, vehicle rental companies may prohibit rented vehicles from traveling across state lines, or may apply surcharges for traveling outside a designated area. Although it is impractical to follow every vehicle to monitor its position, telematics systems make it easy for a vehicle to report a position.
Even when a position is reported, the user may not know how close the vehicle is to a prohibited area based on the position. To assist the monitoring user, geo-fences defining prohibited areas can be defined. For example, an employer could define a 100 foot geo-fence around all bars. Or a parent could define a geo-fence surrounding an area in which travel is permitted, effectively fencing off the rest of the world outside the fence. Geo-fences can even be used to alert drivers, if, for example, the fence is defined around an environmental hazard. The driver could be notified of proximity to the hazard and could thus avoid the area defined by the fence, containing the hazard.
As vehicles travel, they may approach or breach these geo-fences. In order to ensure that travel within a prohibited area is not achieved, or is at least not achieved for a prolonged period of time, reporting systems must report with reasonable frequency, so that the likelihood of breach can be ascertained and/or an actual breach can be detected before the vehicle travels too far into a prohibited/undesirable area.